Morrison Foerster Named a Leading Firm for Impact Investing by Chambers USA 2024

Morrison Foerster’s Social Enterprise & Impact Investing Group has been highlighted as a market leader in the Chambers USA 2024 guide. MoFo’s practice has been recognized as Band 1 in the newly created USA – Nationwide: Impact Investing category, with the firm being one of only two firms named in this highest tier.

Morrison Foerster is a committed participant in the social enterprise and impact investing space—a position we have championed for over 25 years. Our team, spanning corporate, finance, tax, patent, and licensing practices, is passionate about solving the world’s biggest problems through creative business models and mission-focused investments. We have long recognized that impact investing and social entrepreneurship have unique legal challenges, as investors, companies, and organizations determine how to embed social and environmental missions into governing documents, investments, and business strategies.

This practice group specializes in representing “impact” investors, from those that focus on impact first but expect to generate returns in the long term (including families and family offices), to those that prioritize returns but want to ensure positive social or environmental impact or mitigate negative impacts (like impact-focused venture, growth, and private equity firms). MoFo lawyers counsel clients on structuring traditional debt and equity instruments—together with mission-related and program‑related investments, to incorporate mission and to measure, verify, and report on ESG factors in a manner commensurate with financial reporting. The Impact Investing team also provides guidance to private equity, venture capital, and hedge fund investors considering ESG issues in mainstream investments. Further, the team advises portfolio companies—including public and private companies—on how to embed impact into operations and accelerate the positive impact of their products and services, through the use of perpetual purpose trusts, new corporate forms (like the DE PBC) and side car public charities.

In addition to the practice ranking, Chambers also recognized Social Enterprise & Impact Investing Group co-chair, Susan (“Suz”) Mac Cormac, as one of only two lawyers in Band 1 for USA – Nationwide: Impact Investing. Suz is a go-to legal resource for social enterprises (both for-profit and non-profit companies focused on social or environmental purposes), impact investors (investors interested in social or environmental returns), and mainstream companies developing environmental, social, and corporate governance policies. With deep expertise in the impact investing model, institutional investors exploring the space turn to her for creative solutions and her ability to structure both investments and companies to emphasize impact and returns. She has notably deep experience and expertise in ensuring energy, sustainability, and other investments that have positive impact through the use of new corporate forms, hybrid or “tandem” structures with non-profits and for-profits, and alternative debt and equity instruments. And she has educated a generation of lawyers at most other law firms after 14 years as a professor at Berkeley Law School and through her regular lectures at Stanford Law and Business Schools.

To view the complete list of Morrison Foerster’s rankings in the 2024 edition of Chambers USA, please visit the publication’s website.